


Once Upon a Time

by gritsinmisery



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, But only if you squint, M/M, Post-The Sentinel by Blair Sandburg, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-11-07
Packaged: 2018-08-29 17:41:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8499166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gritsinmisery/pseuds/gritsinmisery
Summary: Blair sacrificed his work to save Jim's career, and then disappeared. Neither is handling it well.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The song title and idea for the start of the plot were taken from the lyrics of Dan Fogelberg's song "Once Upon a Time" off his "Nether Lands" album. As you can see, once I ran out of song I had no clue what to do with it. Song doesn't have a happy ending... This story will never be finished, which I guess is an unhappy ending of its own.

7:00 AM PDT

“Yeah, yeah. Nag, nag, nag.”

Blair, who had been sleeping prone, turned his head on the pillow, slowly opened his exposed eye, pulled an arm out from under his quilt and slapped the “off” button on his buzzing alarm clock. Resisting the temptation to just slide his arm back into the warmth and return to Hypnos’s realm, he rolled onto his back and flopped that same arm over his eyes when the sun pouring through the cracks in the poorly fitting curtains hit his face.

Morning already, and a rare sunny one too, not that he gave a damn. Three hours of sleep just didn’t do as much for him as it used to when he was a student, even though he’d been twice as busy then, or so it had seemed – teaching classes, taking classes, writing articles, doing all the necessary politicking that came with an academic life, hanging with the other TAs and RAs, riding along with… yeah, anyway. Now it was just one day after another of dragging unwilling technical college students through basic history courses so that they would walk away with an Associate’s degree instead of just a technician’s certificate. They were the kind of classes that would be passed off to first-year Master’s degree-seeking TAs at Rainier U., but as a publicly self-declared fraud that would now be permanently ABD, he knew he was damned lucky to find any work in academia at all.

Of course, he’d be getting a couple more hours of sleep if he’d come straight home at night after the bar where he worked closed. But there was always somebody who would decide to try for the bartender, and he was always so damned cold, so damned alone… Why should he pass up some freely offered comfort? Afterward he always got dressed and left, because that person wasn’t the one he wanted, and he had nothing to give back, either.

He rubbed his eyes and sighed. Nobody was going to be the person he wanted, because he’d had that person and he’d given him up. His Holy Grail, his brass ring, his Sentinel: Jim. To keep Jim safe – to give him back his life after things had gone to hell – Blair had lied on national television, given up his work of the last four years, and walked away. He’d told everyone else that it was the ethical thing to do, the only way he could live with his conscience. Later, lying in bed on an earlier morning just like this (and weren’t they all?) he’d admitted to himself that it wasn’t his conscience but his heart that he’d had to appease, and frankly it wouldn’t matter today if another Sentinel came up to him and begged on both knees for Blair to take him or her on, enthusiastically consenting any and all tests and publicity, because that person wouldn’t be Jim.

He supposed that some day, a whole day might go by where he wouldn’t think of Jim. But he couldn’t imagine that happening any time soon.

9:00 PM PDT

“Been there; been there; been there and wouldn’t set foot in there again if it were the last bar on earth; been there… I think.”

Jim peered through the windshield of his truck at the signs for the bars and clubs that lined the street in this slightly seedy commercial area as he drove past them. It was a weeknight and they’d all be filled with nothing but regulars, so there was no point in stopping someplace he’d been before.

He didn’t want to be in any of them; he wanted to be home watching the Jags and enjoying a distinct lack of company. But ever since the fiasco that ended with Blair’s press conference and departure, he’d felt a growing sense of unrest, a nagging need for… something. He’d fought it hard – at first he’d ignored it, then he’d cleaned, then he’d refinished nearly every exposed wooden surface in the loft. The night he’d fallen asleep trying to decide between stripping the floors again the next day or completely re-grouting the bathroom, he’d had one of those damned blue dreams.

In it, Incacha stood before him at the foot of the steps of the Temple of Sentinels, while the black jaguar paced along the edges of the jungle clearing, scenting the air, tail twitching anxiously. “Why do you not seek what you need, Enqueri?” the dead shaman asked. “A Sentinel needs a Guide – his soul will not rest until he finds one.”

“And if I choose not to be a Sentinel any more?” Jim responded. “You said before that I could choose.”

Incacha’s laugh was wheezy, as if he had not had the chance to do so in a long time. “You are too far down your path to return to that branching. Denying what you are will not free you now, and denying what you need will only cause you further pain. Seek a Guide, Enqueri, so that your heart may be at ease.” The blue faded away to black as Jim awoke in his sleep mask.

Incacha had been far more direct than ever before, and right, too, dammit. Jim’s senses dulled, but never completely to ‘normal’, and his restlessness only increased. Rather than re-glaze every window in the loft, he gave in to the ‘mystic mumbo-jumbo’ and started a near-nightly search for a Guide.

Without really deciding on a plan he began haunting bars, nightclubs, and hotel lounges on the north side of the city. The first few nights he’d started the truck and let his instincts steer him, now he went there automatically.

He’d step into a room, dial down his already-dulled senses if the lights, smoke, and noise proved to be too much to handle, and make a circle of the place a time or two, ‘feeling’ for something – anything – that would tell him there was a potential Guide there. Every once in a while he got a nibble, maybe a tug on his soul or a sharpening of his senses. He’d seek out the source, talk to the person a little, maybe buy them a drink, and maybe dance. But somehow the pull was never strong enough, his senses never as sharp as he remembered them being, and despite his almost-nightly pep talk to himself about taking what he could get, he always walked out alone. 

Lying in his too-large bed late at night, he thought that maybe he would always be searching. He knew now he’d already had the best – best Guide, best friend, maybe even his best chance at love – and he’d chased him away. The voice inside his head that no white noise generator ever silenced taunted that if the rest of the blue dreams meant something then the merge at the fountain did too, and hadn’t he just screwed himself over good by rejecting that?

Now, driving by the same bars he’d been in over and over, he wondered if maybe his instincts were as dulled as his senses, if maybe they’d sent him to the wrong area. He thought for a minute about going over near the airport where hotels and bars were thick on the ground. The instant knot in his stomach nearly caused him to retch and he quickly gave up on the idea. One more mile then, and he’d call it quits for the night.

A flash of light and a sudden burst of music and laughter as a door opened on the right side of the street caught his attention. The building was unpainted cinderblock with a barely-pitched metal roof, at the back of a parking lot, half-hidden behind a used-car dealership. The only lighting on the place was a bare bulb hanging over the door. Other than the words “Charley’s Bar and Grill” hand-painted on the door and the noise that spilled out when the door was opened, there was no clue that it was not just another out-building for the dealership. 

Jim slammed on his brakes and yanked the steering wheel over, barely succeeding in hitting the entrance to the parking lot and thoroughly annoying some guy driving a car far too close to his back bumper. He knew he’d never been in Charley’s before; maybe it held the person he’d been looking for all this time. 

The inside of Charley’s was no more impressive than the outside – worn wooden floor that creaked as he walked across it, smoke- and grease-darkened wooden paneling on the walls decorated with lighted signs for different brands of beer, the last quarter of the Jags game on a television over the bar and another at the far end of the room, sound competing with the jukebox. There wasn’t a speckled white Formica tabletop in the place that wasn’t chipped, or a dull red vinyl bench seat that wasn’t split open to display the remains of its foam padding. The burly guy behind the bar with the cigarette dangling from his lower lip as he muttered and occasionally swore while making drinks even looked like a “Charley” ought to.

There was someone here though. Jim could feel it. His senses nearly doubled him over as they spun up, and he mentally grabbed two and three dials at a time trying to crank them back down fast enough. He had to force himself to slow down, walk casually, appear to just be searching for the perfect empty table rather than stalking through the room like his spirit animal on the hunt.

The third time he found himself at the bar instead on the other side of the room like he’d intended, he gave up and grabbed the only empty bar stool. The guy behind the bar, pulling a beer with one hand and reaching overhead for a tumbler with the other, just raised his eyebrows in inquiry.

“Draft,” Jim said.

“…minute,” came the reply, and Jim watched the long ash on the end of the dangling cigarette, wondering if it would fall.

9:45 PM PDT

“Sandburg, aren’t you done yet? They’re killing me out here!”

Another tap always had to be switched, another case of napkins always needed to be brought in from the store room, and there were always, always too many orders for Charley to be filling on his own, never mind that just three minutes ago he was the one that sent Blair into the kitchen or cooler to fetch or fix whatever. It was the same old same old, and Blair couldn’t even find the mental energy to be incensed by the unending demands. Jill, who’d been waiting tables here long enough that she blended into the woodwork if she stood still, told Blair just last week that he’d already put up with Charley three times as long as any other bartender before and declared that Blair must have the patience of a saint. Blair knew that it was just that he didn’t give a damn.

Suddenly he felt something odd, like the air was charged, making the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand up. Straightening up from the CO₂ canister he had just switched into the bar’s soda tap, he grabbed a rack of freshly washed glasses and went out front to see if someone literally was killing Charley this time.

Frozen in the ice-blue gaze the minute he walk through the door from the kitchen, he had the presence of mind not to drop the glasses, but could not manage to turn and walk back out no matter how frantically his brain demanded he should. He felt the buffer he’d slowly built up between his soul and his memories, the thin, hard layers he’d laid down daily to keep him from living in constant pain, splinter with a million tiny cracks.

“Sandburg? Sandburg! Wake up, dammit!” Charley’s voice broke the spell. “Sleep on your own time, kid. Now put those away and give me some help here.”

Muttering, “Yeah, yeah,” Blair set the dishwasher rack on the bar and started sliding the glasses into their slots over his head. As he reached up with the last one, Charley barked, “Get busy. Draft at the end of the bar.”

He pulled the beer and set it in front of Jim without looking up, but found his wrist caught in Jim’s grip as he turned away. When a couple of tugs didn’t release him, he reluctantly looked at his captor. “Let go,” he said in a dead voice. “Please.”

“We need to talk, Chief.”

The Great Wall of Ellison wanted to talk, did he? A deeply-buried part of Blair started to rant that there had been plenty of times to talk, in hospital rooms and corridors, on long stake-outs in the cab of the truck where each of them desperately tried to pretend the other wasn’t just a foot away, and endless nights in the loft during that last year where the topics being avoided pushed palpably on both of them until one or the other retreated right out the door. But Blair had stifled that part of himself too hard for too long, and the screams never made it to the surface. One last yank freed his arm, and he turned away. “I’m working.” He grabbed a bar towel and started wiping.

Jim picked up his glass and took a sip. “Work while you talk; it’s never stopped you before.”

He couldn’t help it; he froze for a few seconds. Damn, Jim was good – that one nearly made it through, nearly blew out Blair’s defenses. But four years of feeling like he could never quite say the right thing, followed by a year of hiding himself completely away, allowed him to do nothing more than sigh heavily before he resumed his cleaning.

“Shit, I did it again.” Setting his glass down on the bar, Jim scrubbed his face with both hands. “Look – Incacha sent me to find you.”

Still rubbing, Blair pondered that a moment. “Incacha’s dead,” he pronounced flatly. To keep it from seeming like he was denying the possibility, he continued, “He passed the way of the Shaman on to me. I was dead for a while, myself.” He braced both hands on the counter and finally looked at Jim. “Hell, Incacha can probably contact me twice as easily as he can you. Try something else, Ellison.”

Shaking his head, Jim tried again. “No, I mean he told me I had to find you. I had one of those weird blue dreams. ‘A Sentinel needs a Guide – his soul will not rest until he finds one,’ he said." His face took on that mixture of puzzled and angry that Blair knew so well. “It’s been like a damned fairy tale curse; I’ve felt almost forced to spend every spare minute since, looking.”

“A _geas_ ,” Blair murmured. At Jim’s querying look, he just shook his head. “Never mind.” Once upon a time a whole lecture would have come spilling almost involuntarily from him, but now… He went back to wiping and asked after a minute, “Did he say ‘a’ Guide or ‘the’ Guide?”

The silence went on for long enough that Blair peeked out of the corner of his eyes at Jim. Suddenly finding the foam at the top of his beer interesting enough he had to remind himself not to zone on the popping bubbles, Jim quietly admitted, “'A' Guide.”

“Well then, it doesn’t specifically have to be me. Good. I suggest you keep looking. I’m not on the market.” Blair turned away and called out, “Charley, the light tap’s about to run dry. I’ll go switch it out.” He walked through the door to the kitchen without a backward glance.


End file.
